One of comedian Jim Purol's recurring gags was to stuff record-setting amounts of things in his mouth, especially cigarettes and cigars. For instance, he set a Guinness world record for smoking seven packs of cigarettes simultaneously. Ironically, he was a non-smoker. From the LA Times (July 18, 1987):

His trick of broadening a yawn into a crater crammed with seven packs of gaspers also has given Purol, 35, a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. He scored a second mention by smoking 38 pipes at one puffing. He opened wider, gritted his tonsils, and earned a third entry in 1983 by smoking 40 finger-fat stogies at the same time.
Paradoxically, Purol is a nonsmoker. It gets better. His world cigar smoking record was a charity performance benefiting the American Lung Assn.
"I hate smoking," he explained. "I perform the stunts as a statement against smoking. Lookit this picture of me with cigarettes stuffed in my face. This is glamorous? It's disgusting."

Jim Purol (left) and Mike Papa each smoking 135 cigarettes in five minutes - October 1978

Weekly World News - Jan 1, 1985

Philadelphia Daily News - Apr 22, 1983

Back in 1976, he also set the world's duration drumming record by drumming for 320 hours.

I've seen Superman II a couple of times, but the fact that Lois Lane was chain smoking never registered with me. I'm guessing that cigarettes would have no effect on Superman. So he'd never bother to smoke. Although he mentions in the clip below that he never drinks when he flies. So evidently he can get drunk.

From Drugging the Poor: Legal and Illegal Drugs and Social Inequality, by Merrill Singer:

A noteworthy example of the tobacco commodification of a movie is Superman II, a film clearly targeted to young audiences that for years has been reshown on TV. In the movie, there are over 20 exposures of the Marlboro logo, for which Philip Morris is believed to have paid over $40,000. Moreover, although the character Lois Lane never smoked in the comic book on which the movie is based, she chain-smokes her way through the second Superman movie, and in the final climatic scene Supermn fights it out with his enemies in an urban landscape replete with Marlboro billboards.

Lyndon Sanders opened the Non-Smokers Inn in 1981 in Dallas. At the time, it was the first exclusively non-smoking hotel in America. Actually it may have been the first to offer any rooms exclusively for non-smokers, period. I'm not sure. But as it turned out, he anticipated the non-smoking trend too well. From cnn.com:

In a business sense, he was ahead of his time -- too far ahead. The Non-Smokers Inn did well at first, but by 1991 Sanders had to turn the hotel over to new management, which changed the name to the Classic Motor Inn, and allowed 22 of the 135 rooms to welcome smokers.

It wasn't that the world had turned its back on his idea -- it was that the world had embraced it too thoroughly. Major hotels had started putting in nonsmoking floors, and advertising the fact; people who didn't smoke suddenly had no trouble finding a clean, fresh-smelling room. The Non-Smokers Inn, struggling for business, had to become something else and let smokers in, because the nonsmokers no longer had to look so hard for what they desired.

The earliest report I can find of people in the Persian Gulf smoking ants is the one below, from 1994. But news stories have continued to report this practice. This one from 2008 explains that it's specifically the red samsun ant that's smoked, and explains, "Smoking the red ant gives a similar sensation to smoking marijuana and sniffing glue because of the high concentration of formic acid found in the ants."

In the early 1990s, Regal cigarettes in the UK launched an advertising campaign that featured an everyman named Reg who offered his dad-humor insights on various subjects.

The first ad read, "Reg on Smoking: I smoke 'em because my name's on 'em." As he held his fingers over the 'al' in Regal.

Other insights followed.

Reg on train-spotting: "There's one."

Reg on party politics: "If you drop ash on the carpet you won't get invited again."

But the campaign was eventually banned because medical researchers discovered that the stupid humor of the ads appealed mostly to young adolescents, whereas adults 33-55 years old, who were supposedly the target group for the campaign, didn't identify much with Reg.

Self-lighting cigarettes seem to be an idea that inventors keep dreaming up, not realizing that the idea has already been tried. The basic problem with them is identified in this thread on the Guardian. Either the head of the cigarette rips off as you try to light it, or it doesn't light and you're left with a smashed-up cigarette.

Also, although I'm not a smoker, it seems like a problem that doesn't need a solution. I get the sense that smokers like the ritual of lighting their ciggies.

In the early 1970s, there was briefly such a thing as Marlboro Beer (trademark registration). Philip Morris (having just acquired Miller Brewing) figured that many people like to smoke as they drink beer, so surely a beer that shared the same brand name as their best-selling cigarette would be a success. But apparently test marketing indicated otherwise. So that was the end of Marlboro Beer.

The few bottles of it that were sold now fetch a high price (as much as $1000) as collector's items.

In 1990, R.J. Reynolds test marketed a new brand of cigarette named "Dakota." But the brand immediately generated controversy when internal company documents leaked to the Washington Post revealed that the cigarettes were narrowly targeted at a demographic described as "virile females."

What exactly is a "virile female"? It was apparently "a woman with no education beyond high school, whose favorite television roles are Roseanne and 'evening soap opera (bitches)' and whose chief aspiration is 'to get married in her early 20s' and spend her free time 'with her boyfriend doing whatever he is doing.'"

Masculine woman is an acceptable phrase, as is effeminate man; what is meant here, however, is different from a female who acts like a male. A virile woman, as I interpret the promotional message, is "a woman who associates herself with activities and images formerly considered of primarily male interest."

He further noted that there was literary precedent for the phrase:

Etymologists will support the use of virile woman because the first appearance of the adjective, in William Caxton's 1490 translation of a French romance based on Virgil's 'Aeneid,' was in the phrase "O the fortytude viryle of wymmen."

However, even though Safire had officially approved the phrase "virile female," the cigarettes themselves didn't perform well in the test marketing, so Reynolds scuttled the brand.

In 1974, a cigarette named Zateeva Smokes began to be sold in America. It was advertised on its label as having the aroma and taste of marijuana, but it contained no marijuana and produced no high whatsoever. Therefore, it was entirely legal. The name was a play on the Latin name for marijuana, Cannabis sativa. From an article in Florida Today (Apr 20, 1974):

The pack of Zateeva says it's "An exclusive smoke that captures the heady flavor and grass-like aroma of Cannabis Sativa. All natural ingredients, non-psychoactive, no tobacco or nicotine."

The pack says Zateeva's sole distributor is the House of Imagery Inc. in Montclair, N.J., but the phone company has no listing for that firm. Officials say no cigaret manufacturing firm exists in that town.

Unlike Bravo Smokes (the lettuce cigarette) that I posted about yesterday, Zateeva Smokes were not intended as a harmless substitute to help smokers quit. Instead, their primary purpose seems to have been to prank cops. They allowed pot enthusiasts to stand on street corners, smoking away, and if challenged by a cop, they would inform the officer that they weren't doing anything illegal. They were simply smoking a Zateeva.

So they were essentially a gimmick, and it doesn't seem like they ever gained much popularity. The sole reference to these Zateeva Smokes that I've been able to find is the 1974 Florida Today article. And I'm not sure if it's significant that the article itself ran on April 20 (4-20). Probably just a coincidence.

Alex Boese
Alex is the creator and curator of the Museum of Hoaxes. He's also the author of various weird, non-fiction books such as Elephants on Acid.

Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.